What do you do when buying your dream home turns into your worst nightmare?
It’s a question I’ve had to ask myself more times than I can count. How did I end up here? How did something I wanted so badly turn into one of the hardest experiences of my life?
I lived in the nicest home I have ever lived in, yet somehow, I was at my worst.
If this experience has taught me one thing, it’s that something can look beautiful on the outside while telling a completely different story on the inside.
Looking back now, the series of events that landed me here almost seems unbelievable. I’ve asked myself why this happened, what I’m supposed to learn from it, and whether somehow I chose the wrong path.
I’m beginning to understand some of the lessons. Others, I think, I’m still living through.
But to explain how I ended up here, I have to go back to where the story really started.
Starting Over in Canada
It all began when my partner and I decided to move back to Canada after having our gorgeous baby girl.
I had given up my cleaning business and was a stay-at-home mom still trying to grow my blog big enough to get into Mediavine and actually earn an income from it.
However, I had a baby girl who would only nap on me, so I would literally be trying to blog with a newborn baby sleeping on my chest.
Eventually she started napping by herself, but I kept growing my blog during nap times and late at night.
Then, at the most perfect timing, my years of hard work paid off. Right around the time we decided to move back to Canada, I got accepted into Mediavine and started earning a decent part-time income from my site.
After packing up our cute two-bedroom apartment only a few blocks from the beach on the Gold Coast in Australia, we landed in my sister’s one-bedroom suite in Canada.
We were starting from scratch after selling almost everything we owned, except for a total of four duffel bags between us.
While it was a bit of a shock, I was so happy to be back around my family and old friends in Victoria, B.C., where I used to live and where my partner and I met.
But after a few months in a tiny place during the rainy winter, I started to question my move back home and was itching to buy back into the Canadian real estate market.
With some determination and luck, we found a decent 2.5 bedroom apartment with access to outdoor space at a price we could afford. We were approved based on my partner’s income alone and our down payment, as my blog income couldn’t be counted yet.
But after only a short year, my partner was over Victoria, the traffic, his work, and our condo. He wanted to move to a smaller town where we could trade in our condo for a small house with a backyard.
Deciding to Move Again
We contemplated moving to Squamish, with the possibility of buying a house with my sister, or moving to Nelson, another cute town where I also had family.
After months of talking, we chose Nelson because we thought it would be more affordable and more our vibe than Squamish.
I had just had my best year ever on the blog and was having another great year. While I wasn’t entirely sure if I wanted to move, I did it for the family.
Luckily, I could bring my blog wherever I went, so work wasn’t a problem. I just planned on continuing to grow it.
While Nelson is a small town, it is still highly sought after and can be a very hard place to find accommodation.
We went all in with our move and sold our property with the intention of finding a home we could settle into.
We were lucky enough to find a month-to-month rental from a super sweet family that had lived in the house for 20 years. It was only two houses from my brother’s.
After bouncing between Airbnbs, I was so happy to find a rental and immediately felt at home in the quaint old house.
I love painting and decorating homes, and I was eager to buy a place so I could make it my own. Plus, renting was expensive, so as soon as my partner found work, we were on the hunt to buy.
We loved the home we were renting; however, the family wasn’t ready to sell yet, and it was still out of our budget, but we still ended up comparing every house on the market to this one place where we already felt at home.
Nelson was proving to be a hard market to buy in.
The good deals seemed to go within days, and then there were a ton of expensive funky houses with potential structural issues. People were asking a lot for rundown homes in a small town, although I could understand why so many people wanted to live there with the outdoor lifestyle, amazing ski hill, good restaurants, and cool shops.
Previously, I had bought the first apartment I viewed—twice—because they both immediately felt right for our situation.
Nelson was way harder.
Nothing felt like home or quite right, and we were comparing everything to our rental.
During this time, my dad had a heart attack, which was a huge shock to the system and stressed me out big time for a while.
Once he was recovering well and I was back in Nelson, we continued watching the market like hawks, waiting for something good to come up in our price range.
And then it did.
Finding the House We Thought Was “The One”
One day, just when we were about to give up the house hunt for winter, get firewood for the wood stove, and settle into our rental, a brand-new duplex dropped in price by $50,000, bringing it into our price range.
After looking at so many older homes with potential rot and structural issues, the sound of a brand-new place seemed like a pretty good idea.
So we went in at the high end of our budget, with what we thought was a decent buffer left over, thinking everything would be all good.
I was so excited to move into the house, and all I wanted to do was get settled and feel at home after a busy year. But that never happened.
As soon as we spent our first night there, it all felt completely wrong.
After we made the offer on the house, we drove past and saw our neighbors putting a hot tub on the rooftop deck above us.
We were super concerned and almost pulled out, but after asking questions and being reassured that there were soundproofing measures in place and it was engineered for the weight, we decided to continue with the purchase.
When we got the keys, we were surprised to hear the buzzing and vibration from the hot tub heat pump traveling through the structure and into our living space. We could even hear it downstairs in the bedrooms.
On our first night sleeping in our brand-new home, we hardly slept a wink as the sound turned on multiple times throughout the night, sometimes for a couple of minutes and sometimes for much longer.
Then, to top it off, we woke up to a screeching sound coming through the HVAC system because one vent was almost closed the whole way.
By morning, my partner and I both had this overwhelming feeling:
What did we just do?
After a day or two, we also noticed another weird pulsing sound that made it extremely hard to relax.
Never in my entire life had I been in a house where I could hear a pulsing sound. At one point, I seriously questioned whether our house was cursed or haunted.
We eventually figured out that we only seemed to hear the pulsing sound when both the fridge and heat pump were running at the same time.
I could measure the rhythmic pulse on an audio app, although interestingly, not everyone could hear it.
So this was our introduction to our brand-new home that we had bought at the high end of our budget.
It was supposed to be the place where we could finally settle down.
Instead, I couldn’t relax.
When the Stress Started Taking Over
For the next several months, we tried to work through the sound issues and figure out what we could do.
Sometimes things got better, but then they would get worse again. The constant troubleshooting and uncertainty wore us down.
Eventually we hit the point where we were ready to sell.
But before doing that, we learned that changes made to the rooftop deck had affected some of the original soundproofing. That meant we needed to address another issue before we could feel comfortable selling and moving forward.
We finally had the difficult conversation we had been avoiding and came up with a plan to resolve the soundproofing issues with the original builder involved.
And that was around the time when all of the stress really began to take a toll on me.
Because the house wasn’t the only problem anymore.
At the same time, my blog had massively declined in traffic.
Suddenly the financial reality of our situation hit me.
We had gone in way too deep.
My blog traffic was down about 50 percent from what it had been over the previous couple of years. The online world was changing, and suddenly I had a large mortgage in a small town where there weren’t many work options for me.
Luckily, I was able to find cleaning work, but the thought kept running through my head:
What happens if my blog dies completely?
For the first time in my life, the fear of not being able to pay the bills hit hard.
More than anything, I could hardly believe that I had signed such a big mortgage in a small town while depending so heavily on my blog and Pinterest traffic.
The tension and stress between my partner and me massively increased, and I felt as though I was living in a nightmare.
I was plagued by anxiety and sleepless nights, constantly trying to figure out what to do to get out of the mess we had signed up for.
I felt so house poor.
And I started longing for the financial freedom I had felt when we lived in a smaller place.
The one thing that kept me going was knowing that I had a daughter to take care of.
I needed to figure things out for her.
Maybe the Dream Home Wasn’t Really the Dream
So now, as I sit here writing this from a cozy little carriage house in my sister’s backyard, half the size of the home that I have now rented out, I have to remind myself of something.
Happiness does not come from how big your house is.
It doesn’t come from having the nicest home or keeping up with what everyone around you seems to have.
For me, happiness comes from feeling connected to the people closest to me, having freedom over my life, feeling financially secure, and actually being able to enjoy the life I’m working so hard to create.
If there is one thing I have realized through all of this, it’s how important freedom is to me.
Financial freedom is something I need to take control of myself.
For me, that means lowering my outgoings, downsizing, letting go of excess things I don’t need, and focusing on what actually matters.
Trying to keep up with others’ lifestyles won’t make me happy if it means working a job I don’t love just to make ends meet.
Somewhere along the way, I got lost and thought that living in a nice new home would make me happier.
But sometimes moving forward might actually mean needing less.
For now, I can let go of the bigger house and instead be grateful for what I do have.
I have a healthy and happy daughter. I have family support. I have a roof over my head. I have skills that allow me to earn an income. And I still have my blog that I spent years building, even if I don’t know exactly what the online world will look like in the future.
Instead of constantly looking toward the future, back at the past, or toward the next external thing I can own, I want actually to enjoy the moment I’m in. For the first time since moving so many times, it feels like I have no idea where I want to be.
This isn’t necessarily where I planned to end up.
It isn’t what I thought I wanted, but it is the best option considering our past choices.
Looking back, I also realize that so much of our journey over the last few years has involved us chasing the next thing.
We would get somewhere, settle in, and before long, something else wasn’t quite right. A different town might be better. A house is better than a condo.
And somewhere along the way I got caught up in that too.
When you are constantly trying to improve your life, it’s easy to forget to stop and ask yourself whether the life you already have is enough.
There were places along the way where I was happy. Looking back, some of the homes that didn’t seem like enough at the time gave me something I desperately wanted once I finally had the bigger, beautiful house: more freedom.
My partner and I also view success differently in some ways. What makes one person feel like they are moving forward in life isn’t necessarily what makes the other person feel secure and happy. And I’ve realized that I can’t build my life entirely around somebody else’s definition of success.
For me, success is starting to look a lot less like the size of my house or what I own.
Instead, it’s having enough money left over that I’m not constantly worried about bills. It’s having time with my daughter. It’s being close to people I love. It’s doing work I enjoy. It’s having choices. It’s being able to breathe.
There will always be something bigger, better, or more impressive to chase. But I don’t want to spend my entire life chasing the next thing only to look back and realize that I was already living a good life and didn’t know it.
So here I am, doing my best to enjoy the moment I’m in because I have so many things to be grateful for. And I’m realizing that what matters most isn’t how my life looks from the outside, but how it feels on the inside.
Leave a Reply